


A Universal Problem

by Paycheckgurl



Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Evil Jonah Heston, Evil Twins, Gen, Good Kinga Forrester, Good TV's Son of TV's Frank l Max, Joey the Lemur, Lazy handwaving of how inter-dimensional stuff works, Mirror Verse, Misuse of KingaChrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 11:49:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11943564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paycheckgurl/pseuds/Paycheckgurl
Summary: Jonah and Kinga meet their mirrorverse counterparts. Someone present knows more about alternate universes than they're letting on.





	A Universal Problem

**Author's Note:**

> Going forward I'm going to be referring to our pretty purple bot as Gypsum (which was her name in a number of KTMA episodes before they switched to the current one). 
> 
> Written for Mirrorverse Fest

_Somewhere…_

Kinga Forrester, Gizmocrat extraordinaire and captive watcher of movies, leaned against the counsel on the Satalitte of Love. Next to her TV’s Son of TV’s Frank (not the best name she’d ever heard but she wasn’t about to tell Max what he could and couldn’t do with his life and tried to be supportive of his choices), thumbed his fingers nervously against the table. It was a high up table. A tad too high for Max-sorry-TV’s Son-it had probably been scaled with someone taller in mind; although, Kinga wondered who they could have possibly had in mind for a captive other than herself and Max. They were the direct descants of the original Satellite of Love captives, TV’s Frank and Dr. Clayton Forrester after all. She rearranged her loose hair, which fell down to her shoulders, and carefully moved stray strands off her thick purple glasses. Wearing it up or getting contacts would probably eliminate the problem, she mused, but it had never quite been her style. And maintaining the little touches that made up her individuality was one of the few ways she was going to survive up here. 

The counsel bleeped and she reached a purple jumpsuit covered arm to answer the call. On the other side of the call stood the evilest man she had ever had the misfortunate to lay eyes on: Jonah Heston. Jonah stood there in his black lab coat, open against his bare chest. His thick handlebar mustache dominated his otherwise cleanshaven face. Beside him stood the bots. Tom Servo’s eye patch (bad things happened when you pointed out he didn’t have eyes to wear it over) came into noticeable view on the vidcall. Gypsum, who stood out with her exaggerated lips, snaked down from the ceilings staring directly at them, while Crow stood silently off to the side with a scowl on his face. Jonah crossed his arms, looking at them. Intensely before announcing “Invention exchange! MWHAHA”

Max began the presentation. “Our invention today is a perpetual non-motion machine. Why build a machine that runs perpetuity when you can build one that will never, ever move? Tada.”

Kinga assisted him by making overdramatic hand gestures. Jonah rolled his eyes exaggeratedly. “You’re worse at this than your parents were,” he said. “The best thing that ever happened to this experiment was the day Mike Nelson captured your sweet ole Grandma.”

Kinga felt a shiver down her spine as Jonah waited for a reaction born out of bringing up Grandma Pearl and her father. She kept her face carefully and practiced neutral, but the shiver may have been noticeable. Max gave no such practiced attempts at being emotionless, and let out a small whimper from beside her.

“You…you won’t get away this much longer you fiend.”

Tom Servo and Crow laughed.

“The best thing about capturing you Forresters, is that no one can stand you enough to want to come get you down!” said Servo dramatically.

Kinga bit her bottom lip. Jonah continued on with his presentation.

“See it’s funny that I mention that to you Kinga, because well, you see today’s invention is…” before Jonah could continue with whatever presentation he was giving, both he and Kinga disappeared, leaving Max and the bots standing alone and confused.

* * *

  _In_ _Time And Space…_

As the theme song completed and Jonah and the bots broke their pose, they got set up for the week’s invention exchange. Jonah involuntarily adjusted his glasses, and ran his hand through his unruly mess of brown hair as he did. The prepupal non-motion machine wasn’t really his best work, but he managed to sell it well enough with an enthusiastic presentation which if nothing else made Kinga happy because it made for decent television.

“Not bad, Heston,” she said. “I mean not really that great either, but mmm, not bad.”

Jonah shrugged off screen. Okay, that was a fair assessment.  

“Our invention today is…” as she spoke a man that looked distressingly like Jonah appeared in Moon 13. Kinga blinked. Jonah and the bots stared at the feed blankly until slowly realizing a woman that resembled Kinga, albeit with glasses, her hair down, and clad in a purple jumpsuit, was standing next to them. It was a few seconds before Crow exclaimed “Oh not this again!”

Jonah stared blankly. “This? Again? What?”

The Kinga next them attempted to shove Jonah away, which given his relative size compared to hers didn’t do much, but she somehow managed to push him back a few steps anyway.                                                                                                                                  

After a second Kinga, Jonah’s Mad Kinga, who was being stared at intently by his own counterpart-seemed to catch on to what Crow meant.

“Cambot, Jetscreen, que up the host segments from experiment 611, The Last of the Wild Horses,” she ordered.

Jetscreen came down and Cambot projected the requested videos. On screen, an ion storm raged outside the old SOL, as Mike and the bots talked with their Mads. A decision to use a questionable piece of equipment later, and they switched places in time and space with their counterparts from a mirror universe where TV’s Frank and Dr. Forrester were the hapless test subjects of the evil Mike Nelson and his evil robot friends. Throughout the episode both sets of evil and good SOL crews and Mads kept switching places.

“Oh yeah,” said Servo. “I forgot about that.”

“You forgot you went to a mirror universe?” asked Jonah.

Servo shrugged his arms. “I wasn’t really paying attention in the first place.”

As they talked, the man they presumed to be the mirror Jonah stalked around Moon 13. “Where’s my laser death ray?” he demanded.

Kinga rolled her eyes. “Laser death rays? Seriously. I got rid of those things months ago. They’re clogging up the supervillain markets.”

“Who cares it’s evil and destructive.”

“My Kickstarter backers for one…”

Crow’s eyes went to side wearily. “Okay but can we talk about that mustache? Jonah how come even when you’re evil you still look like a lumberjack cosplaying a geek cosplaying a hipster?”

 “Hey!” said both Jonahs at the same time.

The Kinga in the glasses folded her arms, looking at the machine on the table. “You built a perpetual non-motion machine too? Huh, great minds, right?” she said wearily tilting her head at the yellow clad Jonah. He beamed at her. The bone clad Kinga made a gagging noise off screen.

“Hey we got an alternate universe problem here. Focus people. I can only devote so much runtime to this until I have to send the movie.”

Jonah nodded. “About that. It’s looks like from the old experiment tape the catalyst was an ion storm outside of the satellite and linked through your dad’s old base. But the thing is, the weather’s fine.”

Both Kingas blinked. The jumpsuit-clad one looked at him, impressed. “You know. You’re right.”

“Well what else could have caused this?” asked Max. Max had been strangely quiet through all this. Jonah made a pondering face, wondering if maybe that had to do with him trying to figure out what do with himself in the presence of not one, but two Kingas. Or was it Kingi?

“Um well over here we didn’t get to the second half of the invention exchange yet,” said Jonah. “Maybe it’s whatever you-me-evil mad scientist version of me down there-was going to show.”

Evil Jonah cringed. “Well, now that you say that, perhaps it’s best I didn’t…”

Both jumpsuit clad humans shared a look of confusion.

“Why not?” demanded Mad Kinga.

“Um well, see, it’s best that maybe I keep that idea under wraps going forward so you don’t steal it from me. And also, so I can be absolved of all fault.”

“So, it was your fault!” exclaimed the Kinga from the Satellite.

“You. Heston. The Evil Heston. Fix this now,” demanded the original Kinga.

“No,” he said defiantly.

“I’ve got hungry dinosaurs a level below us,” she warned.

“Alright, alright. I might have been reprimanding Kinga here on her subpar job as host, and was about to show her how easily replaceable she is.”

The color drained from the two Mads beside him.

“Uh oh,” Kinga managed. “I think I know where you’re going with this and it is so not good. First of all, Matt Claude Van Damme is my emergency replacement, not yours. Second of all…”

“Um what?” said Jonah.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said quickly. “Your movie today is _A Story About Love_. Some poorly put together Norwegian romance thing from the 90s. Ardy send them the movie. Now!”    

As Ardy sent the movie and Movie Sign blared, Jonah quickly grabbed the test subject Kinga and dragged her into the theater with them. Kinga attempted to sit on the far-left side of the theater, before Servo flew over and guided her next to his left. The film had sort of an episodic scenes of a relationship thing going on and literally no dialogue outside of the narration, which lent itself well to having four voices chime instead of the regular three. Despite his counterpart’s instance she was underperforming, Kinga managed to get comfortable after the credits and bounced well off the others. At the host segment break Jonah prepared everything he needed for a song about the romance of Norway, quickly realizing that altKinga shared his version’s good singing voice, and they could potentially pull off a pretty decent duet. They got as far as setting up the flag Crow had grabbed from storage, before noticing the Mads were still arguing, having moved down to Moon 14 with a mess of KingaChrome spilling out in front of them. Kinga and Max had switched to their whites-something they usually only did at the very end of the experiment when handling the movie fluid. Jonah’s evil twin was still bare chested despite the others’ attempts at lab safety.

“Um guys?” asked Jonah.

“Not now!” the three chorused.

“Now if you would only adjust JonahChrome,”

“I told you I refuse to call it that, and that’s a dumb name.”

“It’s not even alliterative,” said Max, backing her up. “It really doesn’t even roll of the tongue at all.”

“Cambot’s rolling and we have a segment to do. We really can’t sing over you arguing.”

“Then don’t. Mwhaha,” said Evil Jonah.

“That isn’t nearly as evil or threatening as I think you think it is,” said Servo. “Evil-you is still a massive dork,” he said to his version.

“Don’t let him fool you,” said Kinga. “He’s plenty evil. He and his ilk have been torturing my family for decades.”

Crow rolled his eyes. “Yeah well in this universe your family has been torturing us and our humans for decades. It doesn’t mean they’re actually that good at it. Watch. Hey Kinga. I bet the viewers at home would _love_ to know what it is you’re working on so they’re not left in the dark and feel all smart about having resolution to their story.”

She sighed. “Fine for the viewers.”

“See,” said Crow. “As long as you play along and you don’t like directly ask to be let go or anything she’s super easy. Although usually I mostly don’t really care enough to try.”

Kinga, luckily, didn’pay attention to him, and explained. “So, a while ago I may have found an alternate universe where instead of the Showtrap catching Jonah, we caught some guy named Matt that was on his way to the Gizmonic Space Station. And about half way through the experiment that the alternate version of me in that dimension was running, alternate me kind of disappeared. So, I took over and started running the experiments remotely from across the dimension lines along with yours in our home dimension in case the viewers weren’t taking to you or you died…actually died. Not gotten eaten by a metal dinosaur and were presumed dead for like twenty minutes died.”

“Did you have to bring that up?” whined Max.

“Anyways. Shirtless McGee here tried tapping into the same universe and it can only really handle one of us poking us around.”

“Actually,” said Max. “It can’t even really handle us poking around. We were making it super unstable to start with. If we don’t fix it life in all three of our universes could end forever. But since one of the constants of our three universes is KingaChrome which we can use to stream feed of videos across spacetime giving us a window into all three universes with the right equipment hookup, we’re trying to find a way to use it to permanently close off the connection or we could all die along with everyone we’ve ever known.”

That was enough to royally freak everyone out, and get the bots running and screaming in circles.

“But Joel is someone we’ve ever known!” said Crow.

“And Mike,” chorused Servo.

“We’re all someone we’ve ever known!” added Gypsum.

“Good going Max,” said Mad!Kinga. “That reaction was what I was trying to avoid.” She adjusted a few things, which somehow led to Crow disappearing and being replaced by his evil counterpart. Movie signed blared and the crew, plus one evil Crow, attempted to distract themselves with the movie.

Evil Crow was more annoying than he was evil, but that could truly be said of any version of Crow. He was a decent riffer but not nearly as engaging as Jonah’s Crow, and the lack of playful banter being thrown between evil Crow, Tom, and Jonah was not helping keep Jonah’s mind of the impending doom or even fill the long dialogue-less stretches of the film. At the break Jonah had finally had enough.

“Let us help. Kinga, you know that I know my way around the KingaChrome. I hack it for special effects all the time. Just let me and the other you down there and we can work it out with you. I promise I won’t make a run to try and find the BackJack keys or anything, I just really want to get out of this with everyone somewhat alive.”

She tried tightening two pipes together, resulting in the satellite crew feeling a massive tremor. The group on the moon also shook violently.

“Okay, okay,” she struggling to adjust the tube to bring them down with the tremors. “I need your nerd brain.”

Jonah and the other Kinga screamed on their way down. The continuing tremors made the usual quick and unexpected ride worse than they were accustomed to. Jonah breathed, trying to get in the zone. “Alright. Give me the notes on what you guys did so far.”

Max obligated, handing Jonah a scribbled note. Recognizing his own handwriting on something he absolutely did not write was jarring, but he did everything he could to refocus his mind on the task at hand. The other Kinga took a look at the note as well, and looked as if she were mentally doing some math. He felt himself take charge, ordering the others what to wire where. The tremors continued. As he worked the bots began swapping place. At one-point Max was replaced by another Max. Gypsum by a weirdly sensual version of herself. Tom by a version that took his usual Napoleon complex to extremes. 

“We’re experiencing major malfunction. Life support at 50 percent critical!” exclaimed Gypsum from the Satellite, her original self-having blipped back to the original universe. 

“Life support at 45.”

Jonah continued wiring the portal closing device and redirecting the flow of KingaChrome. The noxious chemical fumes made the AltKinga cough something mad. 

He repeated to himself “please work, please work,”

 There was a large blast. Everyone jumped back. A large flash of light and everyone was blinked away and back to another location. The blast knocked Jonah back, and he hit his head, and he slowly lost consciousness as Moon 14 faded around him.

* * *

 

Jonah came to aboard the Satellite of Love. The bots were gathered around him. Gypsum trying to support his weight against her large purple head. They looked like themselves. No one was decked out in evil accessories that screamed of trying too hard at least.

“You okay Jonah?” asked Crow.

“Yeah. I think so. How did I get back up here?” he asked.

Kinga, his Kinga from the look of it, spoke up from Moon 13, “we sent you back up. You helped stop the destruction of three worlds and all but I can’t have you deciding to renege on your promise and trying to escape. We’re midseason here, and we have ratings to keep,”

“We still don’t get ra…” Max began before Kinga hit him.

Okay, definitely his Kinga. And probably his Max from the sound of it.

“What about the other you and the other me? Did they go back?”

“We’ve got five minutes before we lose video connection, but see for yourself. Jetscreen!”

Jetscreen came down and a Kinga and Max appeared on screen. Only they weren’t aboard the SOL. They were aboard what looked like a backjack.

“Hi. I’m back and our Jonah didn’t come back with us!” AltKinga said. “We were able to get down to the moon and escape!”

“But wait. Where did your Jonah end up?”

The screen switched and a version of Jonah appeared in Moon 13.

“Mwhaha,” he laughed. “I’ve done it! I am in another universe with the superior test subject! I’ll drive him crazy and achieve the work Mike Nelson and Joel Robinson failed to finish.”

Kinga, Jonah’s Kinga, rolled her eyes dramatically.

“Yeah about that. See there’s a reason I never directly entered that universe to run things, he was only the backup, and why his Kinga went missing. A movie managed to crack him up so bad he went down to Moon 13 and threw her into space. I wasn’t about to risk that unless I had no other choice. Besides, he’s not nearly as a good a host as our version of Jonah is. Replacing him this early in the game with a lesser successor would have royally pissed the Netflix execs and my backers off. Have fun being trapped there forever. Bye.”

Jonah, the original Jonah, winced. “Okay I know he was evil and all but that’s really harsh.”

Kinga shrugged. “He tried messing with my things. I don’t like that.”

“And you, Jonah Heston, have movie sign. Movie signed blared and the SOL crew ran frantically to their seats in the theater. Off screen Max looked at Kinga.

“Well I’m glad that’s over,” he said. “I really like not being dead. Does this mean that we’re done messing around with other universes?”

Kinga shook her head. “You know we named our production company Alternalversal for a reason right…”

Max shuddered. Kinga was really bad at learning any potential lessons.

_Mike Nelson and his Robot Pals Are Caught in an Endless Chase_

Kinga smiled. The course was set. She was free and she was home. She couldn’t wait to see her dad and Joey Lemur again. Oh how she adored that lemur. Suddenly though, the ship’s computer blacked out. Max took the controls but they were clearly jammed. Someone was tailing them and had managed remote control. Temporary probably, but still detrimental to the navigation and controls. Out of the rear mirror Kinga saw the ship approaching. A voice came through over the ship’s speaker system.                                        

“Looks like I’ve got to finish this myself,” said the voice of one very evil Mike Nelson.

The End???

**Author's Note:**

> Matt Claude Van Damme is the name of the guy in the purple jumpsuit from Carnival Magic according to the episode credits. He's played by Matt McGinnis, a writer and producer on the show, meaning that someone took the time to give him a last name, so will probably be coming back at some point and play into the show's plot somehow. Or Joel's just trolling us. 
> 
> (I don't actually plan on writing more of this, so yes that's the end).


End file.
